detroit's wealth of ruins

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detroit’s wealth of ruins jonathan jan benjamin mijs


photos and text © 2014 Jonathan Mijs – author photo © 2013 Catherine Wan


detroit’s wealth of ruins jonathan jan benjamin mijs


Detroit’s fall has been long in the making. The biggest city ever to declare bankruptcy, Detroit has suffered outmigration since the 1950s, as people followed the jobs that started to leave the city. Auto manufacturing declined and eventually collapsed, and with it did Motor City.



A sign behind the window of a shop reads “Sorry, we’re DEAD.”


Detroit has come to symbolize the changing economy of America and is often considered a victim of structural forces. For some people the demise represents the consequences of a new age of globalization and the end of an era of American hegemony. Detroit perhaps is all that—victim, symbol, sign of the times—but it is something else, too.


In this photographic essay I explore Detroit through the lens of agency. I want to show that the structural changes that led to the city’s decline have also given room to human creativity, play and entrepreneurship. The photographs presented here highlight the ways Detroit’s citizens push the boundaries between ruins and art, occupied and vacant.


A pawnshop colorfully retires. A sign on the front reads: “Retiring after 86 yrs. Everything must go. Up to 70% off all pawn merchandise. Still buying everything.�


Sam’s loans on Michigan Avenue has closed for business but remains a sight to behold for tourists.


Detroit’s citizens have made their city an urban museum. Part of the tourist attraction is the same fascination with which millions flock to Rome and Athens every year: to see the glory of times gone. Like the classical cities, Detroit marks the end of an era—of American manufacturing. In Detroit there are dramatic ruins of wealth and a wealth of ruins.


The attraction has been described as ‘disaster tourism’ or ‘ruin porn,’ where tourists enjoy sights of destruction from the safety of their cars. But this description fails to recognize the agency involved in the making and keeping of the urban museum.


Tourists pose for ‘disaster porn’ at the Packard Automotive Plant.



The ruins you find in Detroit are ruins, not garbage sites; they are places with names and stories, well-mapped and easily accessible. Walking through a ruin site, you find rubble but no garbage, there is a scent but no stench, you can feel the human touch, but will see no human presence. (Compare to the litter covered, rat, dog and cat infested monuments of Rome!)


A vibrant bed & breakfast industry run by entrepreneurial locals and newcomers provides cheap accommodations for those who want to visit the urban museum, as an estimated 16 million people do annually.



The Temple Hotel is one of the last buildings standing in a rundown neighborhood south of Midtown. Its managers became local celebrities when in last September they sold the small hotel, mainly frequented by prostitutes and their clients, to real estate developers for a sum rumored to have been around $3.7 million.


Many businesses have tried to escape vacancy by retreating into the downtown area. But there in the city’s core they find the ruins of another city: during a visit in September people proudly pointed me to the manufactured reincarnation of Hong Kong, in ruins, that is the set of the new blockbuster movie Transformers 4. Seeing Detroit’s real rubble within a manufactured movie set makes you wonder where ruins end and art begins.



As an empty ‘People Mover’ public transportation train goes its route, a guard tries to keep a watchful eye at the movie set of Transformers 4. The set represents the city of Hong Kong as it lies in ruins. The movie’s production crew used real rubble to create a set of artificial ruins in the heart of downtown Detroit.


Public art colors the streets of Detroit and tags and slurs accompany the graffiti art murals that span dozens of yards in width and height.



A street corner at the edge of the Heidelberg Project ‘public art museum’: the pavement is covered in colorful drawings, an empty suitcase reveals another, in Russian doll fashion, and a Stop sign is taped over to read “ST...ART.”


Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project brings arts to the streets and residents into art in what is statistically one of the most struggling neighborhoods of the city: the pavement brightly colored, sculptures populate the front and back yards, and a totem pole of stuffed animals marks the spot where Tyree welcomes visitors.



On the corner of Ellery and Heidelberg Streets, a truck, disappearing into the grass, provides fertile ground for weeds and flowers.


These and other street art echo Diego Rivera’s frescos painted on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), the city’s major art museum and one of America’s top art collections. Rivera’s murals of the industrial process symbolize the continuity between art in private collection and the decoration of public space. Richard Estes’ paintings and David Barr’s sculptures, on display at the DIA, evoke the empty factory halls you find outside. Detroit’s abandoned auto plants themselves resemble art installations that explore color, form and space.


The Fisher Body Plant 21 was designed by Albert Kahn, ‘the architect of Detroit’ and one of America’s most prolific architects. The plant is the signature building of the Fisher Corporation, which at its peak employed more than 100,000 people. The exterior and interior of Detroit’s abandoned factories are enduring works of art.




Last page: on the left, a work of graffiti art as seen on a Detroit street, showing a woman in trench coat, wearing a gas mask, helmet, and assault rifle. From the rifle’s shaft grows a rose. On the right, a panel of Diego Riviera’s fresco cycle in the Detroit Institute for Art depicting a Ford plant factory worker. Like some of the graffiti art you find as you walk down the streets of Detroit, Riviera’s project, painted on walls and panels, addresses social ills, speaks up for those without a strong voice, and celebrates the ordinary (working) man.

In Detroit vacancy is cultivated. After declaring bankruptcy the Michigan Theater was repurposed as the world’s most atmospheric parking lot: a ruin re-used. Longtime citizens and the newly arrived grow crops and keep chicken in once empty lots as part of large and small scale initiatives in urban farming.


Michigan Building opened in 1926 to accommodate offices on its upper floors and a concert hall and theater on its ground floor—its 4,500 seats made it one of the largest in Michigan. When the theater closed in 1976, office tenants threatened that they too would go unless offered adequate parking. To that end in the late 1970s the Michigan Theater was converted into a parking lot; a one-of-its-kind with ceiling and walls that feature original decorations that have stood the test of time.



These playful, creative, and entrepreneurial uses of space illustrate how human agency in Detroit blurs the lines between ruin and art, real and manufactured. In doing so they make us question what we see when we encounter vacancy, and what it means for a place, a building, a city to be used and inhabited.


Jonathan Mijs is in the sociology department at Harvard University.




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